Are you ready to rumba?

By GRAHAM REID

She sits regally on the stage in an enormous rattan chair. At 76 she still cuts a striking figure, a large, proud woman in a vivid red dress, smoking an enormous cigar.

Trinidad Rolando is watching her life dance before her eyes - literally - in a blur of exotic movements, thrusting pelvises, barely dressed women and handsome men. Her life comes with the sound of vibrant, life-affirming Cuban music.

She is Lady Salsa, the main character in the stage production of the same name, and for the second half of this visually dazzling touring show it is her story being danced out as the eight-piece band Sonora la Calle takes the audience on a musical journey through the streets of Havana and the Cuban revolution.

Sometimes Rolando sings and dances, but she is equally mesmerising as she simply sits and watches, that huge cigar sending blue smoke swirling through the air as the young cast shimmy and samba around her.

And there she is, before her eyes, as a young girl in the form of the diminutive Kenia Bernal Gonzalez whose black, braided hair reaches to the back of her knees.

What must Rolando, a grandmother, be thinking when she sees her life like this? Does she dream of long ago when she met Nat King Cole at Club Tropicana and taught him the rumba? Of when she had a brief but memorable encounter with the handsome leftist revolutionary icon Che Guevara in Cuba's Plaza de la Revolution in Bolivia 35 years ago? Of her time as a teacher during Fidel Castro's literary campaigns? Or when as an actress she took theatre into tobacco factories and sugar plantations?

"This show," she has said, "is part of my life and one of the best things that's ever happened to me. When you come to the show you can hear and experience society in Cuba and feel what it's like."

Rolando's life is the stuff of legend, its real-life characters like gangster Lucky Luciano drawn from newspaper headlines and its backdrop an island which steams with music.

Lady Salsa - launched at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000 - is the brainchild of director and writer Toby Gough who has done these sorts of generic shows before.

Previously he devised and staged an African Julius Caesar in Malawi which toured central Africa and he took to Scotland, and has delved into Tibetan, Indian and Native American source material for theatrical productions. He's staged shows in a botanic garden in Scotland, in caves in Eastern Europe and on the rim of a Hawaiian volcano.

Admittedly inspired by the international success of Cuba's geriatric Buena Vista Social Club, Gough may appear opportunistic - and have substituted hot sexy young dancers for pensioner cachet - but his show bristles with life. And sensuality.

"Cuban music is so different," says 23-year-old Gonzalez with a seductive toss of her braided mane. "You hear Indian music and you think about religion and culture and consciousness, but if you hear salsa you move your body and have fun and go to bed for sex."

It's certainly eye candy to pulse-pumping music, a loosely historical narrative about untamed sexuality versus Catholicism and oppression, has a knife fight which wouldn't disgrace West Side Story, and is a musical cabaret which includes African drums and the slave rebellion. It is volatile politics, virtual sex and vigorous dance.

It is a blend of traditional and original songs which takes a journey from primitive drums through cha-cha, mambo, rumba and into contemporary salsa.

And at the heart of the second half is the life of Trinidad Rolando - aka Lady Salsa - played in her younger days by Gonzalez, an actress, dancer and choreographer from Havana who has seen the show as her passport to the wider world.

A graduate in contemporary dance, she has worked in theatre and dance in her homeland and played Shakespeare's Juliet and was Ariel in a Cuban production in Austria of The Tempest. It was while preparing Romeo and Juliet she was spotted in the street production by Gough and offered the chance to appear in a Lady Salsa movie which didn't eventuate but a year later became the stage show.

Gonzalez grew up in a poor home with little music - "We didn't have a playing machine" - but her boarding school took international students so she discovered Indian and Mexican music before that of her own culture.

Playing a living person who was so involved in the culture and politics of her homeland has given Gonzalez an insight into her own past.

"I never thought that in Cuba there were people like Trinidad who had a lot of stories. You need somebody from outside Cuba to show you what you have because in Cuba people don't want to look back. In the past five years many things about our history and music have come out but 10 years ago it wasn't like that. It was more like, 'Let's go forward', because we were living in bad times and we wanted to go forward for a better life. Now things are more quiet and we can get things from the past.

"On tour we are living together and I feel closer to her. She's a wonderful woman and I hope when I get as old as her I have the same spirit."

If the show is to believed that seems to include a predilection for younger men.

Gonzalez confirms Gough's difficulties with Cuban authorities getting the show on the road.

"You wouldn't believe [what] I went through to get the company out of Cuba," he says. "Each performer needs six separate letters of authority to leave. It took months and was very very difficult," says the man who, Sydney's Sunday Telegraph tartly noted, directed Danni Minogue in the S&M Macbeth so probably knows what "difficult" means.

"Coping with the Cuban bureaucracy is the hardest thing thing I've ever done."

(This from a man who crawled through a 3km tunnel to enter Sarajevo during the Bosnian war to stage an opera.)

Gonzalez says when the tour is over the cast will have to return home and have approved overseas work before they can reapply for travel permits if they wish to leave again. But the money is good, despite the government's large cut. "In Cuba my pay in the theatre is less than A$40 ($45) in a month. This is my first real money in four years of working hard. Maybe it's not enough for you or other people but for us it's all right and right now we are working really hard and the show is really good."

And the Cuban government can see the promotional and fiscal advantages of such a touring show, especially in the wake of the Buena Vista Social Club. Lady Salsa is a fully sanctioned Cuban cultural export.

Lady Salsa is also capitalising on the current interest in salsa which, ironically, isn't entirely a Cuban music at all. The genre is a recent American phenomenon dating no further back than the 70s when Latin band leaders and those with a passion for pre-revolution Cuban music pulled together orchestras which could play the vibrant beats and would incorporate splashes of Puerto Rican, Dominican and Colombian styles.

A New York compere, Izzy Sanabria, is credited with introducing bands as "salsa", a reference to a 30s Cuban song Echale Salsita (Put the Sauce In It). These "saucy" groups brought Afro-Cuban music and jazz brass sections to the dance-floor, led to a renewed recognition of great band leaders such as the late Tito Puente (who died two years ago just as the music was gaining international recognition) and singer Celia Cruz.

These days the salsa brand includes Latin New York hip-hop acts alongside long-time Miami acts such as Gloria Estefan. Madonna launched her Maverick record label with a stylish young Miami-Cuban singer Jorge Moreno who covered the 50s hit Babalu by Desi Arnaz.

While that history may be important it's possible to simply appreciate Lady Salsa for what it is, a colourful blend of sensuality and style which has drawn praise from Kylie Minogue ("the show just oozes sex appeal") and Richard Branson ("one of the most enjoyable ways of spending an evening").

Some of the claims made for it are inflated, however. Lady Salsa may have worked at Club Tropicana which is evocatively described as "the drinking hole of Al Capone" but simple maths tells you she was 5 when the gangster was sentenced to prison for 11 years in the United States and lived the rest of his reclusive life delusional from syphilis.

Lady Salsa hardly requires such hype. When that rocking, horn-driven band kicks in and dancers in gold bikinis and tight tuxedos start creating their rapid, foot-tapping magic it is impossible to sit still.

Salsa is seductive.

* The Lady Salsa national tour opens in Christchurch on Thursday, plays Hamilton's Founder's Theatre on November 4 and 5, and arrives at Auckland's Civic for a four-night season from Thursday, November 7.